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Jellied Chicken

A chilled chicken dish set in gelatin with lemon, sherry, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Jellied Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock and gelatin

  1. Boil the chicken in enough water to make 3 pints of stock.

  2. Soak the gelatin in ½ cup of cold water.

  3. Clear the stock with the egg white.

  4. Pour the hot stock over the gelatin and season with salt, red pepper, black pepper, lemon juice, and cooking sherry.

Set the mold

  1. Line a mold with slices of hard boiled egg and lemon.

  2. Shred the chicken into small pieces and place it in the mold.

  3. Pour in enough jelly to fill the mold.

  4. Pour the remaining jelly into a bowl and place the mold on or near ice.

Serve

  1. To serve, turn out the mold onto a plate and garnish with spoonfuls of the clear jelly.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Chicken + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together891 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  3. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat and the flavorful stock that forms the jelly.
Gelatin
Sets the stock into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Egg white
Collects particles from the stock as it cooks, leaving the jelly clear.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the jelly.
Cooking sherry
Adds aroma and a rounded, sweet-savory flavor to the jelly.

The step that matters

Clearing the stock with egg white. Egg white proteins coagulate and trap cloudy particles as the stock heats, so skipping or rushing this step leaves a murky jelly. Cooks should let the stock simmer gently rather than boil hard, so the egg white collects the impurities and can then be strained out.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, gelatin, egg, pepper, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Pineappleabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, gelatin, egg, pepper, sherry. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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